Old hotel photos

[officialryguy1]

I manage local listings for a hotel with 16 locations (and growing).

They typically buy-up older hotels and refresh them with new designs - new furniture, new wall colors, new decor, rebrand the restaurant, etc. so the issue comes up with these older GMB photos surfacing over the newer

In Google's guidelines for images, you simply select the photos you wish to deletee and they are removed. But many of the images that show up are older than my history with the hotel, and the little garbage can icon is not present. I submit request after request and have flagged thousands of photos which still remain on the "photos submitted by business" section of their GMB images... I feel this has something to do with being a manager of some listings and no a full owner maybe? Or that the photos were uploaded by a Google Account which is not the same one I use to login with....

I am going through the process of bulk verifying the Google Account I have with Google My Business Support, but wondered what else my be an option so get the new images to surface over ones that are from 2016 and prior.

Thanks in advance!

 

[JoyHawkins]

Have you reached out to the GMB team to see if they can help at all? That's what I would do next. You can tweet to them at @googlemybiz or message them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GoogleMyBusiness/. Usually they respond in 1-2 business days.

 

[Cherie Dickey]

Ditto Joy. That's what I've had to do in the past. It seems that only the person who uploaded the photo is the one who is able to remove it after a listing changes ownership. Support is usually helpful, but they are the most helpful in the case of a rebrand. Just be prepared for them to ask you to send them photos of the permanant signage showing the new brand if it's not in street view already.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@officialryguy1, a couple things:

1. Check customers' Google reviews. Those sometimes contain photos. If they contain outdated photos, it would be a tough putt for the hotel to ask them to update or remove those photos, but I suppose that's an option.

2. Check the site itself and third-party sites for those photos. Sometimes Google pulls them in, sometimes you can find those photos just in Google Images, and sometimes you can do something about them.